A Supercomplication
In the spring of 1929, Henry bought into a new Fifth Avenue co-op under development. Thrumming with victory, the financier had all but snared the crown in the war of complications. With Patek Philippe’s craftsmen painstakingly working on his pièce de résistance, all he had to do was await final delivery of his prize. Still, Henry lost little of his enthusiasm for watches. With his quiet intensity he continued to monitor the results of the Geneva Observatory timing competitions, and before the year was over he snapped up a handful of new first prize winners, as well as a pair of superlative minute-repeater wristwatches.
These were good times in America, in particular for American capitalism. In his final State of the Union Address, President Calvin Coolidge buoyed an already optimistic nation, telling Congress, “In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment . . . and the highest record of prosperity.” With little skepticism, news of the exploding stock market regularly made the front page. It was not unheard of for an investor to realize gains of ten to twenty points in a single day. Hot stocks like RCA tripled, even quadrupled in value.
In 1927 brokers borrowed $4 billion (about $52.9 billion today), lending the money to stock buyers. By the end of 1928, brokers’ loans had vaulted to $6.4 billion ($84.7 billion today). More led to more, which led to more still, and by 1929 almost four dollars out of every ten that banks loaned was earmarked to buy stocks. The extended boom allowed the middle class to skip up the rungs on the nation’s wealth ladder.
And yet there were troubling signs: steel production slipped; housing construction slowed; car sales dipped; the number of slums, racial unrest, poverty, and debt all continued to grow. But most chose not to see them. The chorus of naysayers was small, while the circle of professional utopians was large and loud. In June the financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch pronounced, “There is no reason why both prosperity and the market should not continue for years at this high level or even higher.” The future, for those who peered into it and did not look too closely, appeared quite rosy.
Between June and August the market’s bull run coursed ahead like a runaway circus train and stock prices reached their highest levels to date. On September 3 the Dow peaked at 381.17. The country’s mood was euphoric.
At sixty-one, Henry had decided to spend this latest chapter in life with Florence in a palatial new Rosario Candela–designed apartment hotel. This was the golden age of the grand luxury apartment in New York City, and no architect built grander apartments than Candela, the Sicilian-born son of plasterers, who set the standard for upper-class urban living. The fourteen-story building at 834 Fifth Avenue was his most massive and elegant to date, encompassing 13,000 square feet on the site formerly occupied by the homes of three of the city’s most influential families—the Guggenheims, the Goulds, and the Lewisohns—as well as the private Bovee School.
Candela buildings were known for their immense scale, open views, and amenities such as private laundries. At 834, Candela designed a series of simplex, duplex, and maisonette apartments, and no two dwellings were alike. On the east side of the building the architect built a private 2,000-square-foot garden. The elegantly understated exterior with its limestone façade and elegant Art Deco–style cartouches would soon be Manhattan’s most majestic and exclusive address, housing some of the city’s most prominent residents.
As the developer Anthony Campagna secured an initial $7 million (about $94.3 million today) in financing, Henry and Florence were one of the first ten to buy in on the building, billed as the city’s first 100 percent cooperative. They joined Carl J. Schmidlapp, vice president of Chase National Bank; Mrs. Elden C. DeWitt, whose husband had made a fortune manufacturing proprietary medicines such as the One Minute Cough Cure; Ezra D. Bushnell, the director of the Hamilton Trust Company; and Mrs. John E. Berwind, a widow whose husband had been one of the largest coal operators in the country and the brother of Edward Julius Berwind, a man with whom Henry and his father had tangled over paintings at auction some four decades earlier. Hugh Baker, president of National City Bank, the largest investment bank of its day (decades later renamed Citibank), took the 8,000-square-foot three-story penthouse with a small conservatory built inside the living room.11
After peaking in September, the market’s mighty surge began to wobble. With prices fluctuating wildly, on October 17, 1929, the Yale economics professor Irving Fisher optimistically proclaimed, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Not a week later, on October 24, “Black Thursday,” the market plummeted. Stocks continued to drop over the next six days, losing nearly a third of their value; $25 billion (equal to about $336.8 billion today) in savings was obliterated. With stunned crowds flocking to the New York Stock Exchange, stories rippled through the throngs on Wall Street that people were committing suicide.
The bottom continued to fall. By the end of November investors had lost some $100 billion (about $1.3 trillion today) in assets. The avalanche of economic misery wreaked havoc over the widest possible area; families lost their life savings, and companies were wiped out. Attempts to rally the market were brief. Rumors ran rampant that the bankers were selling off, and investors panicked. The former General Motors president William Durant, along with the Rockefellers and other big investors, bought large blocks of stock to shore up the market. This proved detrimental for Durant, who found himself bankrupt within seven years.
As the country’s economy all but collapsed, not only did construction continue apace at 834 Fifth Avenue, but the building expanded. In the summer of 1930, its developers purchased the mansion owned by the family of the late multimillionaire James B. Haggin on the adjacent corner at Sixty-fourth Street. As it turned out, 834 Fifth Avenue was the last great apartment house to rise in the city before the Depression halted such projects. Seven decades later it would be called “the most pedigreed building on the snobbiest street in the country’s most real estate–obsessed city.”
On October 1, 1931, as the country spiraled into mass unemployment and bankruptcy, Henry and Florence moved into their fifteen-room duplex overlooking the Central Park Zoo. A private elevator took the couple to a grand entry gallery, where a curving staircase stood, connecting the ninth and tenth floors. The place had the ambience of a country house, with plaster moldings, working fireplaces, mahogany doors, and dark wood paneling. Its massive size and darkness entranced all, except for Henry’s grandchildren, some of whom found it unsettling during formal visits.
Henry installed a burglarproof vault, where he kept his watches. By the time he put his feet up on his Chippendale desk, he had several new Patek Philippe watches to store inside it.
The Graveses appeared to glide through the economic morass. Although the idle rich who primarily lived off the interest and dividends from their securities were devastated following the Crash, the economic cataclysm hardly seemed to scratch the surface of Henry’s upper-class privileges. Many in their milieu, terrified as they watched their fortunes disappear while their debts mushroomed, had reduced some of the expenses of their cozy lifestyle: dismissing staff, curbing travel, and dropping club memberships. Others in the smart set made a great show of frugality. In 1935 Doris Duke, the wealthy tobacco heiress, courted public empathy when she told a phalanx of reporters on the Hawaiian leg of her year-long, around-the-world honeymoon with husband James Cromwell that her bathing suit was three years old. The “richest girl in the world” failed to mention that she had just broken ground on a $1.4 million ($23.5 million today) estate in Honolulu. The eclectic mansion called Shangri La was the most expensive home built in Hawaii at the time.
At the Fifth Avenue apartment, Henry retained his four maids, five fewer than the couple maintained at Shadowbrook, but then again that was a twenty-seven-room house on ten acres that necessitated a small army of gardeners, groomsmen, and chauffeurs to tend to the grounds as well. One of the benefits of apartment dwelling was that it required fewer servants.
The Graveses lived as if someone had stopped the family’s clocks sometime in 1927. In addition to spending summers at Eagle Island, they began dividing the season, spending part of it at the exclusive cottage colony called the Homestead in the Virginia Hot Springs, often accompanied by Gwendolen, Reginald, and their children. An accomplished rider, Henry rode the resort’s famous trails with his daughter and granddaughter. At Christmas, Henry and Florence followed the same ritual, spending the morning at their daughter’s Fifth Avenue apartment before driving off to Duncan’s house on Long Island. In the evening they returned to their own duplex, where all of their children and grandchildren assembled for Christmas dinner.
Although Henry had long retired, he continued to list his title as vice president of the Atlas Portland Cement Company, in which he retained a considerable financial interest. The company certainly rode the boom of prosperity. Between 1906 and 1910 it paid out 8 percent dividends, stopping only to expand into new plants and enlarge existing ones. In 1929 Atlas Portland operated seven American-based factories that churned out more than 36 million barrels of cement a year, making it the largest cement concern in the world. Two months after the stock market imploded, the U.S. Steel Corporation acquired Atlas Portland Cement Company in a stock swap worth $31,320,000 (about $432 million today). The transaction involved 180,000 shares of U.S. Steel common stock in return for Atlas Portland’s outstanding stock and assets, equal to one share of U.S. Steel for every five shares of Atlas. The de Navarros, Maxwells, and Graveses had retained large stakes in the company. With some luck, Henry got out just in time, and the deal created something of a windfall, for the market would bottom out in 1931. Henry had preserved the core of his family’s wealth. Many decades later, his grandson Reginald Fullerton, Jr., would claim that the family’s fortunes had remained untouched by the stock market crash.
The Graves family was rocked in other ways, however. On June 2, 1930, Henry’s older brother, Edward Hale, had died at sixty-five. (His wife, Jean, had died three years earlier.) Four months later, Duncan Graves’s firstborn, Henry, named after his grandfather, died just before reaching his sixth birthday. Equally startling, without warning on December 10, 1932, Henry’s fifty-nine year-old younger brother, George Coe, suddenly and mysteriously died. He had been traveling aboard the SS President Coolidge across the Pacific Ocean, making his way from San Francisco to the South Sea Islands.
Unmarried, George spent his days visiting many exotic ports, such as Cuba and throughout Southeast Asia. Outside of the family trusts, he had an estate worth more than $1 million ($16.8 million today), excluding his real estate holdings. A trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he left one-quarter of his estate to the Museum, along with forty-one etchings and paintings. To Henry and their sister, Daisy, he gave his Orange, New Jersey, home on the Graves homestead, and he left Gwendolen his Cape Cod estate, Sylmaris. He divided the residue of his securities and cash among his nieces and nephews.
The terms of the Graves family trust divided the core among the remaining descendants of Henry Graves, Sr. With the deaths of Henry’s two brothers (the family matriarch, Isabella Hale Graves, had died on February 23, 1926), he had gone to court to contest his father’s trust to reapportion the remaining shares. With each death of a Graves family member, the amount received by the immediate succeeding descendants of Henry Sr. grew. In a morbid twist, as Henry’s family got smaller and the wealth of his friends and contemporaries shrank, his fortune continued to swell.
• • •
If anything exemplified Henry’s financial health, perhaps it was his ability to continue underwriting the decidedly glamorous life of his youngest son, George Coe II. An intrepid explorer, George spent much of his time in distant lands, following uncharted paths, bringing back mementos (black bear skins, stuffed heads of wildlife, and aboriginal figurines inlaid with mother-of-pearl) from the most isolated corners of the world. At Yale he had become great friends with the similarly inclined Bruce Thorne, the wealthy grandson of a founder of the Montgomery Ward department store, and together they hunted brown bears in Hokkaido, Japan, prospected for gold in isolated pockets of the Yukon, and trekked across Kenya and Rhodesia in search of big game and adventures. An enormous pair of curved elephant tusks flanked the foot of Henry and Florence’s spiral staircase, a souvenir from their son, as was the copper-lined baby elephant foot used as an umbrella stand. (A second was kept at Eagle Island, where George’s numerous trophy heads hung.)
The great adventurer George Coe Graves II with his kill in Hokkaido, Japan. Courtesy of Elizabeth Pyott.
In 1929, following George’s graduation from Yale, Henry financed the Thorne-Graves Arctic Expedition to the Polar ice caps on behalf of the Field Museum in Chicago to capture the Pacific walrus. George spent three months among the ice floes at the edge of the Arctic on the Dorothy, an old 105-foot halibut schooner equipped with a 270-horsepower diesel engine and an iron bark hull. Anchored near Koliuchin Island, the team brought back seven specimens, later stuffed and displayed in a diorama at the museum’s Marine Mammals Hall. Writing in the Field Museum News, Wilfred Osgood, the curator of the Department of Zoology, said the museum was “indebted” to Henry Graves, Jr., for his “substantial contribution.” In addition to underwriting the expedition itself, Henry bankrolled the installation, an elaborate in situ re-creation of the walruses sitting on the ice pack under the midnight sun.
With Henry shunning publicity for his financial support, all of the glory belonged to George. He was nominated into the exclusive, secret society of the Explorers Club in New York, whose membership boasted the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Admiral Richard Byrd. (Women were not admitted until 1981.) On the heels of his Arctic exploits, on November 1, 1929, George traveled to Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East to head up the Morden-Graves North Asiatic Expedition under the auspices of the American Natural History Museum in New York. George’s traveling party included the famous explorer William J. Morden, director of the Explorers Club, and George Goodwin, the museum’s assistant curator in mammals. (It was Goodwin who introduced the use of beetles to clean the carcasses of small animals.) Laden down with supplies, the trio left on the Trans-Siberian Railway to stop in Amur, from which they would make the rest of the arduous journey on horseback and dog sleds. The group headed toward the windswept steppes of eastern Siberia, with stops in Samarkand and Bukhara, to find the elusive long-haired Siberian tiger and Saig antelope. In the end, George, with the aid of local trappers, secured three of the tigers, two male and one female, using improvised trap guns placed along the spoors in the snow, as well as six antelope.
Six months later, as George trekked across Africa, a tuxedo-clad Henry attended the dedication of the American Museum of Natural History’s new South Asiatic Hall, where the Siberian tiger and Saig antelope would eventually be displayed.
• • •
On January 19, 1933, Henry received his prize: the Graves Supercomplication. The full thrust of winter had yet to arrive, but a distinct chill hung in the air. Three months earlier, an angry, anxious nation tossed out Herbert Hoover and elected the Democratic candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt as America slipped further into the depths of the Great Depression.
The golden pocket watch was breathtaking. The presentation box appeared fit for royalty. Made of pink-yellow tulipwood inlaid with ebony and a mother-of-pearl panel, it was engraved with the Graves family coat of arms. The interior of the silk-lined lid concealed the Patek Philippe certificate. The pocket watch was technological perfection and aesthetically flawless. On the front mean-time dial, a “IIII” was used instead of the more common Roman numeral “IV” for a better visual balance of the numbers around the dial.
Patek Philippe had sent the watch from Geneva on December 16, and it took nearly a month to cross the Atlantic. In order to ensure that the pocket watch was not disturbed en route to New York, the watchmakers had stopped it from running at 12 o’clock. Patek Philippe sent a special letter to the U.S. Customs Bureau, requesting that its officers not attempt to wind the watch in order to avoid any improper handling that might disrupt the mechanism. A slim envelope containing three single-typed sheets with detailed instructions in English accompanied the piece, under the title “Complication for Mr. Graves’ Supercomplicated Watch #198’385.” (A duplicate was sent to Patek Philippe’s New York offices.) The instructions explained how to set every recondite measure of time, along with advice about how to handle such sensitive features as the double winding system that activated both the striking mechanism (by turning the crown forward) and the winding of the watch (by turning the crown backward), which had kept chief technician Jean Piguet awake a night. For good measure, Patek Philippe explicitly warned that, before starting the process, the watch must be placed in a flat position with the enamel dial facing up, the hands set forward, and never while the chimes were ringing.
The timepiece’s stunning twenty-four complications were everything that Henry had desired when he first approached Patek Philippe nearly eight years earlier. The zenith of artistry and technology, it was the most complicated watch in the history of time. It surpassed the Marie-Antoinette, the Leroy No. 1, Ami-LeCoultre Piguet’s La Merveilleuse, and all of James Ward Packard’s grandes complications. It was also the measure of a period that was slowly crumbling.
In Geneva the economic turbulence had dissolved many companies that had resided in the golden web of Patek Philippe’s elite dealerships and retailers built up more than a century earlier. Business with America’s glitterati declined severely. Henry’s payment of $15,000 for the Supercomplication was more than the price tag of a very expensive vanity project for the firm; it was financial lifeblood.
Internally the maison underwent a series of wide-ranging shifts as a result of the Great Depression. By 1932 severe financial realities had forced the founders’ successors to sell their majority in the firm. Adrien Philippe, who took on a directorship in 1913, was the last blood relative of the founders to run the company. An offer from Jacques David LeCoultre from Jaeger LeCoultre in Le Sentier was passed over in favor of the one presented by Charles and Jean Stern of Fabrique de Cadrans Stern Frères. The Stern brothers had enjoyed a very long relationship with Patek Philippe, having manufactured dials for them over many years.
Under the Sterns, Patek Philippe remained committed to preserving its nineteenth-century watchmaking traditions of superior craftsmanship and technological innovation, while maintaining the house as a family enterprise. In 1934 Charles Stern sent his son Henri, born in 1911 and trained as an engraver, to temporarily run the company’s American operations at 607 Fifth Avenue in New York. Even while America foundered, its market for luxury watches remained much brighter than Europe’s. Alfred Stein, who had opened the firm’s first distributorship at 68 Nassau Street just off Maiden Lane and who, over the years, had assiduously nurtured Patek Philippe’s relationship with retailers, found his relationship with Geneva foundering. When the Sterns took over in 1932, he sold his shares to the brothers, who in turn became majority stakeholders, and left both the company and its board of directors. Two years later Stein died.
In 1935 Henri Stern moved Patek Philippe’s offices, opening the firm’s new American headquarters, the eponymous Henri Stern Watch Agency, in the International Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. His wife and his son Philippe, born in 1938 in Switzerland, soon joined him there. Stern, who did not intend to remain stateside indefinitely, traveled to Geneva only at the end of World War II, in 1945. After a brief trip, he once again returned to New York, where he ran the firm’s corporate offices until 1958. In New York he worked to cultivate the firm’s wealthy American clientele, preserving its relations with its best patrons and collectors. He also further cemented the watchmaker’s reputation among collectors for complicated movements, proving its inventive aptitude, miniaturizing the most sophisticated complications: split-second chronographs, minute repeaters, and perpetual calendars inside of the exceptionally confined space of the now popular wristwatch.
Henri also groomed his son Philippe, who went on to study computer science in Germany and business administration at the University in Geneva, to eventually take over Patek Philippe. From a very young age Henri instilled in his son two essential principles: the first was that Patek Philippe must stay small and independent; the second was that the maison remain dedicated to crafting the world’s highest quality, most beautiful timepieces.
• • •
As well as being a shimmering trophy, the Supercomplication appeared in Henry’s life as an ominous talisman, its presence coinciding with a series of devastating events.
On the evening of July 17, seven months after its arrival, Henry’s great friend Edwin Gould complained of feeling unwell after dinner. He retired to his bedroom at his mansion in Oyster Bay, New York. Just after midnight Gould, age sixty-seven, suffered a heart attack and died.
Two months later, Henry’s former daughter-in-law, Margaret, returned from a trip around the world with her three children aboard the SS President Pierce. Since her wedding to Dexter Hewitt, she and her children had remained largely estranged from the Graveses, although, given their social circle, from time to time they drifted into each other’s lives. On September 9, 1933, Margaret and her brood—Henry Dickson, Florence Barbara, and Mary Dickson—sailed into busy New York Harbor, past the gleaming skyscrapers that lined the harbor. The day the family arrived the sky heaved with moisture, the residue from a major Atlantic storm that had blanketed the coast the previous two days. The children, dressed in their formal travel clothes, gloves, and collars, disembarked with Margaret and stood on the platform as porters carried the family’s trunks and packages. Craning their necks above the scurrying passengers, food carts, and newspaper boys, they waited for their car and driver to whisk them back home to Ardsley. As the swarm thinned and then disappeared, Margaret’s driver was nowhere to be found.
Frantic, Margaret tried to find her husband, unaware that, four days earlier, the New York Times had reported that he had died of a sudden heart attack. The truth was far murkier. While Margaret had been visiting the souks of Asia and the boulevards of Paris, her husband had charted a course through his wife’s fortune and lost nearly all of it. Just days before she returned, Hewitt, her family later maintained, had committed suicide, making Margaret a widow for the second time in a decade. This time she was also nearly penniless. Jettisoning the Hewitt name, Margaret resumed calling herself Mrs. Henry Graves 3rd and soon sold the Ardsley mansion. Embittered and seemingly abandoned by the smart set, Margaret told her children, “They come to the party when you’ve got it all. Where are they now?”
Feeling herself backed into a corner, Margaret took her former father-in-law to court in order to reinstate the shares from the Graves trust to provide for her children. After negotiations the parties came to an agreement to once again start payments to the grandchildren. The children resumed a formal acquaintance with their grandparents, but their life of privilege had taken a swan dive.
A year later Henry and Florence found themselves once more in mourning. After financing for a six-month Pacaraima-Venezuela Expedition fell apart due to the economy, their son George Coe II hung up his guns and moved to Los Angeles to become a partner in the newly formed brokerage firm Simmons & Peckham, with offices in the Pacific Mutual Building. He took an apartment at the swank twelve-story Arcady Apartment Hotel Building on Wilshire Boulevard. George transferred his taste for adventure and the adrenaline charges he got piloting his seaplane across the Yukon and big game hunting to hurtling along the streets of Los Angeles in one of his big, souped-up cars. On November 3, 1934, Henry received a devastating call: while speeding down Valley Boulevard in Pasadena, George had been killed in an automobile accident. His body was returned to New York for the funeral at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, and he was buried alongside his older brother in the Graves mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow. Unmarried and childless, George had an estate valued at nearly $1 million (mainly in stocks, bonds, his Bellanca airplane, and hunting trophies), which was left to his parents. As she had done nearly ten years earlier, Florence memorialized her youngest son, pressing his photograph inside a golden locket.
For the second time in a decade, Florence Graves memorialized a son, her youngest, George Coe II (left), in a gold locket, alongside a photo of her husband and their children taken on Eagle Island in 1909 (right). Photograph by Stacy Perman. Courtesy of Gwendolen Graves Shupe.
At each end of this topsy-turvy decade, Henry had buried a son, each a bookend to an era that began flush with optimism and prosperity and ended in gloom and panic with the fear that the ebbing of economic malaise remained in some unknowable distance.
• • •
The arrival of the Supercomplication signaled a period of great personal grief and high public anxiety. Rather than a magnificent private trophy, the watch became something of a horological celebrity, as had the grandes complications of earlier periods. Its fame put Henry in the white-hot glare of the kind of publicity he found most distasteful. For the first time, the exceptionally reclusive financier found himself the center of unwanted attention.
He was said to have asked Patek Philippe to refrain from mentioning his pieces in any sort of marketing, but photographs of “the Graves,” described as owned by a “private collector,” showed up in magazines in both France and the United States. “Time Is Only One of Many Things This Two-faced Watch Tells,” claimed the caption in one without revealing the owner’s identity, while a French publication, headlined “Geneva Watchmaking, Racy Watches,” displayed images of both dials and the movement. Despite Henry’s intense desire, publicity over the world’s most complicated timepiece emerged repeatedly in the years after he received it. Among collectors and enthusiasts, “the private collector” was known to be Henry Graves, Jr.
C. B. Driscoll’s society column, “New York Day by Day,” chronicled tableaux of life in Gotham that ran in newspapers from Florida to Montana to California. On June 21, 1938, Driscoll opened his column with the words, “Henry Graves, Jr., has one of the most expensive hobbies in New York. He is a watch collector. Mr. Graves pays $2,500 or $3,000 for most of his specimens, and he has to be on the ground to get them for that.” Readers learned that Henry owned “more than fifty Geneva observatory winners”—“none of them,” Driscoll noted, “a trick watch.”
The publicity more than grated on Henry. This was a time when the nation’s wealthy went to great lengths to mask their fortunes in the midst of massive unemployment and economic upheaval. Stories of burgled mansions littered the papers. Bankers had become Public Enemy Number 1, with Congress regularly railing against the villains.
Earlier, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son from his nursery had left Henry deeply rattled. The fraught saga began with a $50,000 ransom note on March 1, 1932, and ended with the infant’s remains found just four miles from his home. J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to undertake an investigation that stretched over two years before Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant with a criminal record, was arrested, convicted, and finally executed on April 3, 1936. The kidnapping horrified and riveted the entire nation. The newspaperman H. L. Mencken called the kidnapping and trial “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
For Henry, already shattered by the deaths of his two sons, the Supercomplication seemed to bring the worst kind of attention. He apparently explored the idea of selling the pocket watch, and a potential buyer was said to have been identified. But just as suddenly as this avenue was taken up, Henry appeared to drop it without further discussion.
While at Eagle Island one afternoon, Henry took Gwendolen out on the lake in one of his motorboats. Remarkably he carried the Supercomplication with him. As they moved out into the deep cerulean waters, Henry became agitated. Pulling the watch from his pocket, he began to share his misgivings with his daughter. Owning such objects “brought nothing but trouble,” he said. “Notoriety brings bad fortune.” At one point he cut the engine. “What is the point of being wealthy and owning such objects if something like this could happen?” he asked. With that he pulled his arm back to toss the Supercomplication into the lake when Gwendolen cried out, “No, Daddy!” Stopping him just in time, she reasoned, “Let me hold on to that. Someday I might want that.”
Henry cruising Upper Saranac Lake in his favorite speedster, The Eagle. Courtesy of Cheryl Graves.
From this point forward, Gwendolen kept her father’s masterpiece for safekeeping. Eight years in the making, the Supercomplication had been in Henry’s possession for scarcely three. And for the second time in his long collecting career, his acquisitions virtually ceased. It would be nearly four years before Henry obtained another watch.
• • •
As the Great Depression entered its seventh year, America was suffering great anxiety and pessimism. President Roosevelt won a landslide reelection with many of his New Deal policies, such as Social Security and unemployment benefits, popular with the public.
The financial forces that had rocked the world finally made their way to Henry’s doorstep. The owner-shareholders of 834 Fifth Avenue went into foreclosure, encumbered by two mortgages totaling more than $3 million ($49.7 million today). Hemmed into ninety-nine-year leases with terms that made it nearly impossible to cover the mortgage through sales or rentals, the original resident-stockholders, including Henry, took over the developer’s shares and formed a new building corporation, and soon after the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company took it over at auction. While the building’s solvency and legal status gyrated through the courts, Henry and Florence held onto their apartment. In 1946 the building was reorganized under new owners. Laurance S. Rockefeller, the venture capitalist, philanthropist, conservationist, and grandson of John D. Rockefeller, purchased the building from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for $1.55 million ($18.3 million today) and took over the triplex penthouse.
• • •
When he needed money, Henry did what the wealthy had done for centuries: dipped into the family treasures and sold them off, in pieces. Three years earlier, in the fall of 1933, he had led executors in selling the Graves homestead in Orange, New Jersey, to the real estate developer Colyer Homes, Inc. The property, site of his childhood home, some of the Oranges’ most famous balls, and his father’s orchid conservatories, was turned into a plot of tract homes.
In April 1936, Henry arranged to sell 115 of his finest etchings and engravings, including the works of Dürer, Frank Weston Benson, Rembrandt, Whistler, and James McBey, through the American Art Association Anderson Galleries, Inc. It was among the art world’s highlights of the year. The bound catalogue for the sale exclaimed, “No other collection so rich in beauty, so carefully chosen, and in such splendid condition has ever been offered at public sale in this country.” At the time, Old Master print sales provoked the same kind of unrestrained excitement that Picassos and Van Goghs would five decades later.
The auction took place at East Fifty-seventh Street on the evening of April 3, with the bidders arriving in their dinner jackets for the 8:15 sale. Henry’s Dürer masterpiece, Adam and Eve, went for $10,000 ($165,740 today), the biggest sale of the night, while Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print brought $7,300 ($120,990 today). The firm of Charles Sessler, the prominent Philadelphia dealer in rare books and prints, bought both. Despite the economic free fall, serious collectors continued to shatter prices for important art (much like the explosive sales at auction for art, jewels, and wine that would smash records during the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century). The entire sale realized $79,635 (about $1.32 million today), which would certainly allow Henry to maintain his grand standard of living for some time.
The astonishing prices aside, the evening was notable for another reason; until the spectacle of Henry’s single-sale auction, the public at large had little knowledge of the scope of the financier’s great art assemblage.
• • •
In November the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini described his country’s alliance with Germany as an “axis.” A month later King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek declared war on Japan. Germany continued its goosestep toward war. In America, unemployment hovered at nearly 17 percent and FDR raised the income tax on America’s wealthiest to 79 percent.
The heavy tax levy, along with increasing property taxes, made maintaining the rustic palaces of the Great Camps a burden. Many tycoons attempted to offload their camps; some simply abandoned them to the elements. Henry decided to sell Eagle Island. Following the death of their son George Coe, he and Florence had begun spending more of the season in Virginia at the Homestead, and in 1936 they skipped Upper Saranac altogether. A four-page brochure advertising the island noted, “Adirondack Lodge will make its strongest appeal to someone in quest of a summer home which combines to an unusual degree the seclusion of forest and lake with the comforts of a town house.” At the time the camp was valued at upwards of $1 million ($16.4 million today). It languished on the market for a year.
After an acquaintance of Mrs. Graves, who sat on the Girl Scouts Council of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, mentioned that the Scouts were looking for a new camp, the couple offered to sell Eagle Island to them for $20,000 ($331,480 today). But in the middle of negotiations, without explanation, the couple decided to gift the entire island and its contents to the Girl Scouts in memory of their two sons. The cache included all of Graves’s legendary boats, the trophy heads, and a silver and china set for fifty. The transfer was the one and only significant donation Henry made during his lifetime.
Before the handover, Henry told his caretaker, William Meagher, that he could take anything he liked. Meagher took the monogrammed silver and a number of trinkets, then boxed up the china and dumped it in the lake, where, according to locals, a windfall of numerous treasures found their final resting place.
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Despite having pruned his considerable art collection, Henry still owned more than a hundred exceptionally rare English, French, Old New York, and historical American naval prints, one of the most remarkable and largest collections of its kind. And the auction had represented but a small sample of his etchings and drawings. His discerning and eclectic tastes had led him to acquire exhaustively—his collection of Chinese porcelains numbered in the thousands and covered the most important dynasties, some pieces in the rarest glazes—and intensely: his collection of French paperweights were all produced during the classic period. His profoundly large coin collection remained untouched, as did his prizewinning, custom-designed mechanical watches—except for the Supercomplication, now safely in the care of his daughter, Gwendolen.
In 1940 the Supercomplication surfaced once again in the pages of Life magazine as part of the feature “Watches: These Are the Best in the World.” Under four images depicting each dial and two of the corresponding layers of the intricate movement was the caption “World’s most complicated watch.” The magazine noted that it was made for a “private collector.” Henry’s name, engraved on the enamel dial, had been deleted in the photograph. In the same article, James Ward Packard was described as “America’s greatest watch fancier and collector,” and photographs of the Packard astronomical watch and his beautiful musical alarm watch that played the Jocelyn lullaby accompanied it. The article was something of an epitaph for the golden age of pocket watches and the grand collectors who so passionately acquired them. Nowhere did the name Henry Graves, Jr., appear. The man behind the most complicated watch in the world became a shadow victor in a phantom race.